There are things you can’t fly above

Jordan Black and James Wooldridge hug during at a joint service for Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson, two relatives among the nine shot dead, at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., June 27, 2015. Survivors say Sanders tried to talk the gunman out of his attack on June 17, then tried to shield his aunt with his own body. (Travis Dove/The New York Times)

Photo: Travis Dove, New York Times

We were in the air when the Charleston shootings happened. I only caught fragments of the story, playing on the airport bar TVs. Images of bodies, images of blood, images of the suspect, who looked pretty much like those guys always look.

And I remember what I thought: “Another crazy white guy.” This country has had a plague of crazy white guys lately. We worry about Islamic terrorists, but really we are being terrorized by crazy white guys. People are dying because of crazy white guys, including a disproportionate share of black people.

(The other group negatively affecting black people is other black people, but white people don’t talk about that because they’re only killing each other. We might want to spend some money combatting this kind of terrorism, but no, it’s armed police and the war on drugs every time. That is not exactly a solution-based response.)

But honestly, sitting in a plastic chair at the United Express gate at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, I was sad about the deaths but cynical about the outcome. They’ll have a trial, and people will say it’s an anomalous event, and the guy will get locked up and the cameras will crouch in waiting for the next outrage.

It wasn’t until Saturday morning, three days after the shootings and two days after the media coverage began, that I nipped across the rainy street from my hotel and found a Walgreens that offered me, at full price, a day-old New York Times.

And I was sitting there in the green and orange wasteland of the hotel coffee shop, reading about the whole thing, sucking down the coffee, consuming the news, and I came to the story of Tywanza Sanders. His name is already fading from memory, but maybe it deserves to be noticed a little more.

The shooter, allegedly Dylann Roof (although the “allegedly” here is only pro forma), sat quietly in the Bible class, then rose, yelled some stuff about the Bible, then pointed his gun at 87-year-old Susie Jackson. Sanders, Jackson’s nephew, moved between the shooter and Jackson.

Sanders, 26, tried to reason with Roof. He asked him why he wanted to kill churchgoers, given his interest in Scripture. He tried to persuade him to put the gun down. Roof responded, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over the country.”

Then he shot Sanders. Then he shot Jackson, the woman Sanders had been trying to protect. And they both bled out on the sanctuary floor.

And I was crying at a damn hotel coffee shop, wedged between the egg station and the neat rows of Raisin Bran, little embarrasing tears plinking down on the newsprint. Tywanza Sanders. If you’re looking for a hero, that’s a place to start.

And I realized somewhere in there that this was a big deal, after all. It wasn’t just another crazy white guy story. It was a racism story. It was a story about the legacy of slavery, which is a topic white people have managed to avoid for 150 years. The issue became taking down the Confederate flag, which, fine, it’s a lovely thing to do, to remove those banners of oppression.

But we haven’t exactly solved the problem.

I got back home and dug back into my life again, and meanwhile the ripples of the Charleston murders expanded outward, and then, yow, Obamacare was reaffirmed and gay marriage was officially declared to be A-OK, and there were a lot of signs saying “Love Wins.” Which again is, yes, splendid, but my position is that love always wins.

There were millions of gay relationships before gay marriage became legal, and lots of those were enduring partnerships that brought refreshment and joy to all who witnessed them. The law can make love more difficult, but love always bats last. It is sometimes all we have, but it can sustain.

To those who cannot find a partner, love is still available. Intentional families are formed every day, often very informally. We try to do for each other; we try to help. Our organizations, governments and corporations don’t do so well at the love thing, but humans do.

Because, here’s the thing: The men and women of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church met in solemn congregation, and they decided to forgive Dylann Roof. They didn’t threaten retribution in the streets; they didn’t hire lawyers and file lawsuits against every entity in South Carolina. They forgave him.

Who among us would have the courage to do that? There was no “inappropriate in a time of mourning” stuff, they just went ahead and forgave him. Because their faith told them that was what you did. You rose above. You shone your light so all could follow. And love won again.

So she tucked it away under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back to have a little more conversation with jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.

Jon Carroll has been a San Francisco Chronicle columnist for 35 years. Before that he was a magazine editor. He's won awards doing both things. He writes about cats, politics, children, religion, more cats, travel, word games and strange, almost unknowable things. He was born in Los Angeles of hardy native stock.